Honesty gets Emacs patch rejected
A developer's patch for Emacs was rejected due to GNU's policy against accepting work assisted by Large Language Models (LLMs). The developer had used GLM 5.2 to identify performance issues and draft the patch, but was transparent about the LLM's involvement. The rejection has sparked debate about the policy and its potential to punish honesty and integrity.
- ▪The developer used GLM 5.2 to identify performance issues in Emacs and draft a patch.
- ▪The patch was rejected by the emacs-devel mailing list due to GNU's policy against LLM-assisted work.
- ▪The developer argues that the policy is flawed and punishes honesty, as they could have hidden the fact of LLM usage but chose to disclose it instead.
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| Original publisher | Xlii |
| Canonical URL | https://xlii.space/eng/honesty-gets-emacs-patch-rejected/ |
| Publication time | Fri, 26 Jun 2026 02:09:01 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-06-26T02:19:29.731Z |
| Last seen | 2026-06-26T02:19:31.287Z |
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2026-06-25 Honesty gets Emacs patch rejected I’ve been working on Emacs performance on macOS for a couple of months - not continuously but for couple of months nonetheless. During that time I’ve been occupied with hooking up instrumentation and creating benchmarks. I also gave multiple LLMs the codebase and asked for it to search for specific things. Usually the results were poor. After analyzing patches, either the impact was minimal or the problem was misunderstood - something completely expected. Though over this time I formed some opinions about the codebase I believe are true. Opinions, that on macOS the main problem with performance consists of rendering issues and memory thrashing - happening with rapid allocations and deallocations.
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